


Dearly Beloved Old Schoolmate

by vassalady



Category: 101 Dalmatians (1961)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-11
Updated: 2012-08-11
Packaged: 2017-11-11 22:00:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/483334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vassalady/pseuds/vassalady
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At age fifteen, Anita Darling has never kissed a boy. But she has kissed Cruella, many times.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dearly Beloved Old Schoolmate

**Author's Note:**

> Some characterization/backstory taken from the original novel, including the name "Dearly."

"Anita, darling, have you ever kissed a boy?"

Anita Darling had managed to make it to fifteen years old without ever being asked such a thing. That the question eventually came from her friend, Cruella De Vil, shouldn't have been a surprise. Cruella was a shockingly open person, and during the school year, she was usually putting someone in an awkward position with her forwardness or playing a prank on a teacher. With the pranks, she almost always let herself be caught. It was no fun unless someone knew she had done it, and Anita wasn't someone enough to count.

Cruella flicked back the white braid behind her shoulder. "You oughtn't looked so shocked, darling. It was a simple question."

Anita marked her place in her book with a finger, placing it in her lap. "Well, Cruella, I don't think that's really appropriate."

Cruella looked flatly at Anita. "You're no fun."

Anita reconsidered her choice to come to Hell Hall. While mandatory evacuation had ended a few years earlier, the war seemed far from over, and her parents saw the invitation from Cruella to spend the summer at her family manor as a precaution. It wasn't that Anita didn't enjoy or didn't like Cruella. It was simply that concentrated doses of her were occasionally difficult to manage.

"Well, no," she said at last, embarrassed. "Not that I should have."

The look that passed over Cruella's face was thoughtful at best.

They were sitting underneath a tree on the manor grounds. Cruella was swabbed in a number of blankets, although Anita found it quite warm out. Cruella suffered from a condition that left her perpetually cold. Whether this was the cause of her other various eccentricities, Anita couldn't be sure.

"So you have never kissed someone?"

"I kiss my family."

Cruella's look was pitying. "That is not kissing."

She leaned forward suddenly, shedding the blankets. "What are you-" Anita said, but Cruella cut her off by grabbing her face and pulling her in.

It wasn't at all like kissing a family member. Anita was frozen as Cruella pressed her lips very firmly against Anita's.

Finally, Cruella pulled back, still gripping Anita's face, and frowned. For a long moment, they just stared at each other.

"Um," Anita said, licking her lips. Had they always been so dry? "Could, uh, we try that again? I don't think I did it right."

Cruella smirked. "Anita, darling, do try to reciprocate this time."

Anita tried. And this time, it was much more pleasant. She let her arms wrap around Cruella, and Cruella's grip loosened. And then Cruella opened her mouth, and Anita stopped in shock.

"Go with it," Cruella said with a soft exhalation of breath that tickled Anita's skin.

So she did. This seemed much more complicated, and Anita wanted to go back to close mouthed kissing. But then, as Cruella's hands drifted down her back, and her tongue flicked at her own, Anita found herself liking it more.

They broke apart, breathing heavier. Anita tried to focus on Cruella, but she felt a little dizzy and disoriented. "Do you..." she began, and she had to take another deep breath before continuing. Cruella looked mildly flushed, and she was sure she looked even redder. "Have you ever kissed a boy?"

"Not like that," Cruella said, and she captured Anita's mouth again.

Anita found herself kissing Cruella in dark corners for the rest of the summer. 

One afternoon, they snuggled together underneath a bear rug in the attic. Although the day was hot outside, the dusty attic remained surprisingly cold, and goose bumps appeared on her arms. Anita wondered that this must be how Cruella felt all the time.

They were curled up facing each other. Cruella had drifted off, her black braid falling in front of her face. Anita lifted it away. If she closed alternate eyes, she could pretend that Cruella had either all black hair or all white hair. Anita made a bit of a game of it for awhile.

"What are you doing?" Cruella asked. Her eyes were still closed.

Anita ducked her face further into the cover of the rug, blushing. "Nothing," she murmured. She blindly sought out Cruella's hand and twined their hands together.

The summer was coming to an end. Anita couldn't ask what this was. She liked kissing Cruella. She wanted to continue kissing Cruella. But it didn't fit in her life outside Hell Hall. Anita would say this moment was the greatest and most painful of her life, just laying on a dusty attic floor with her best friend.

Her parents sent for her a week later.

The night before she left, Anita snuck out of her bed to Cruella's room.

"Are you awake?"

Cruella sat at her dresser, a brush in hand. Her other brush was on the dresser with white hair twisted around the tines. She looked at Anita through the mirror. And then she turned on her stool with a smile. "Anita, darling, come in."

Anita closed the door gently behind her. The room was boiling with the three extra heaters installed.

Cruella snorted. "Don't worry, Mummy and Daddy knocked themselves out ages ago." She moved to her bed and sat on it, legs crossed. She patted the spot beside her.

The bed sank further under Anita's weight with a creak. She copied Cruella's position.

"Anita?" Cruella took her hands in hers. "Darling, you have to speak with me. I'm not a mind reader."

Anita clutched Cruella's hands. "I don't want to go."

To her surprise, Cruella laughed. "Darling," she said, "we'll be back at school in a matter of weeks. It'll be no time at all. That's always been your biggest problem, just worry, worry, worry. Do you know what a wet blanket is?”

“Please, Cruella,” Anita said, “don’t tease me. I...” And here it was, and she couldn’t say it. “I’ve enjoyed this summer. I’m glad I came.”

“I knew you would.”

Sweat was beading on Anita’s forehead. The room was just a little too warm for her. She pulled a hand away to fan herself with her nightdress collar.

“Braid my hair, darling, would you?”

Anita began to weave Cruella’s hair into its customary braids. The strands were wavy from the tension they endured all day. When she had finished both plaits, she pinned them up, and Cruella pulled on her night cap.

Anita turned Cruella back around, and then she kissed her. At first, she just pressed her lips against Cruella’s, and it almost felt like the first time, as flustered as Anita was. And then they fell into the familiar pattern they’d created over the past two months, their hands running over each other, tongues and teeth and lips pulling at each other, and breaking away just long enough to breathe at intervals.

They curled up under Cruella’s covers, and Anita fell asleep trying not to think about tomorrow.

 

When the new school year began, Anita fell into her usual routine. She caught up with her friends, they openly mocked their teachers, and they lamented that, no, the school had decided it would remain an all-girls school.

Cruella avoided these conversations. She always did. They never interested her, and Anita drifted between the group and Cruella as she had always done.

Anita couldn’t say anything was different between her and Cruella, but she felt different. While she laughed at Vicky puffing out her cheeks like Miss Lockhart, she’d glance around looking for Cruella, wishing Cruella was there, wishing they were back at the manor, just the two of them.

It was frustrating and left Anita listless for weeks.

But Cruella solved all her problems by one day getting into an argument with a teacher and swallowing an entire pot of ink. Cruella was expelled on the spot; no amount of her parents’ money could save her.

She tried to contact Cruella, but she had disappeared from London entirely it seemed.

Then the Germans attacked again, and it was only Cruella’s disappearing act that saved her from the same fate as her parents. The incredible De Vil fortune fell to Cruella.

Within in three months of her parents’ deaths, Cruella became engaged to a furrier. She received an invitation to attend the ceremony, but Anita, in her room at her parents’ country estate, felt a sudden anger flare in her. She tore up the invitation and threw it away.

Two weeks after the marriage, Cruella showed up at her door in London. She was draped in a white mink coat and smoked a cigarette from a long holder.

“Anita, it’s been too long!” she said, throwing up her arms.

“Yes,” Anita replied, but her tone was hard.

She listened to Cruella prattle on about her husband, his list of shortcomings, and the absolute pleasure it was to be back in London. 

Cruella asked how their old school chums were doing. She laughed about some incident or another, and while she remembered them, she’d insert some catty remark in typical Cruella fashion. But the intention behind the remarks were no longer to make Anita shake her head and laughingly protest. They were meant to be mean.

As they chatted, Anita came to realize that their romantic liaison, for that was what it had been, had ended the moment they'd woken up in bed together that last morning in Suffolk. Her heart broke, but in return, she felt a sense of relief. She had been holding on in hope to something that would never be, and it felt good to just let go.

The next day, against her parents' wishes, she bought a Dalmatian puppy and named her Perdita.

A few more years passed, and then Anita met Roger Dearly, and she fell in love again. This time, it was mutual. She accepted her parents' disowning her for marrying Roger, who was nothing more than an out-of-work musician. She took a job, which she had never needed to do before. She was happy. Cruella came and went in her new life, mostly to object to it. But Cruella had become a part of the world Anita had lost.

Roger's song, although mocking, was nothing worse than what Anita and her schoolmates, including Cruella herself, had ever done to others. So Anita laughed and felt less guilty for it than she thought she ought to. And it helped Anita realize how much Cruella had changed.

The woman who stole her puppies was not the girl from Anita's childhood. She wasn't the girl who stuck spiders in the teacher's desk. She wasn't the girl who drank an entire bottle of ink to prove a point. And she definitely wasn't the girl whom Anita had fallen in love with at fifteen.

She would never admit it to Roger, but Anita mourned the loss of that girl and that beautiful summer when Anita had been, for the first time in her short life, absolutely happy.

Dearly beloved old schoolmate indeed. If Roger only knew.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Dearly Beloved Old Schoolmate](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8775067) by [RsCreighton](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RsCreighton/pseuds/RsCreighton)




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